Joachim Peiper

Joachim Peiper (30 January 1915-14 July 1976) was a German SS colonel (with the rank of Standartenfuehrer) during World War II. Peiper was involved in several war crimes in the Soviet Union and Western Europe, and he was said to have been eager to burn down and massacre whole villages. He was murdered in 1976.

Biography
Joachim Peiper was born on 30 January 1915 in Berlin, German Empire to a middle-class family from Silesia; Peiper's father Waldemar Peiper had fought in East Africa until 1915, and he served in the far-right Freikorps during the Interwar period. The younger Peiper did not have good enough grades to enter college, so he joined the Hitler Youth with his brother Horst in 1933 and later the SS. Peiper rose through the ranks and eventually became an officer, training other SS soldiers under Paul Hausser. In 1939, he was promoted to Lieutenant (Obersturfuehrer), and he married one of Heinrich Himmler's secretaries, becoming a part of the SS leader's entourage. He visited concentration camps and other installations with Himmler, and he travelled across occupied Europe.

Peiper would first enter a combat unit attached to Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler in 1941, and his company suffered heavy losses at Mariupol during the war with the Soviet Union due to Peiper's aggressive tactics. In 1943, he led a battalion of the 2nd Panzergrenadier Division at the Third Battle of Kharkov, where he distinguished himself. When he discovered the burned bodies of 25 German soldiers who had been killed by Soviet partisans, he had the village of Krasnaya Polyana burned down and its villagers massacred, and he was known to be eager to execute the order to burn down villages. Later in 1943, he was moved to Italy, and his men killed up to 195 Italian civilians in the village of Boves on 8 September. From November 1943 to March 1944, he returned to the eastern front, but he was later transferred to Belgium, where he had five German soldiers publicly executed for stealing chicken and ham from local villagers. In July 1944, he suffered a nervous breakdown during Operation Cobra, during which the Allied Powers broke through at Avranches and mauled his division. He would later fight in the Battle of the Bulge (during which he may have perpetrated the Malmedy massacre), and he was later transferred to Hungary, where he took part in Operation Spring Awakening. On 8 May 1945, his unit surrendered to the Americans on the Enns River in Austria, and he was captured on 22 May.

On 16 July 1946, Peiper was sentenced to death by hanging for his role in several war crimes during World War II. However, the German church's objections led to Peiper's sentence being commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1954 it was commuted to 35 years. Peiper would be released in December 1956 after serving just over eleven years in prison, and he worked as a car salesman after the war. However, his status as a war criminal led to him being denied visas, and he became a translator in the town of Traves, France in 1972. In 1974, a French communist identified him, and he became the subject of death threats when the French Communist Party publicized his war crimes in L'Humanite, a left-wing publication. On the night of 13-14 July 1976, his house was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and he died with a rifle and pistol in hand while shooting at the attackers. Nobody was found guilty of his murder.